Global history of Kimberly-Clark maintained in Knoxville

photos by Paul Efird/News Sentinel
The prototype of the first Kleenex facial tissue pop-up package is part of Kimberly-Clark’s corporate archive housed in West Knoxville. The archive has 1,700 linear feet of material related to the company’s 140-year history, including product samples, documents and photographs.

Housed in a climate-controlled stockroom in the former Goody’s Family Clothing warehouse are 2,500 boxes of records comprising 1,700 linear feet of documents, images and product samples for iconic brands like Kleenex, Kotex and Scott Paper.

Kimberly-Clark recently relocated its corporate offices from downtown Knoxville to a fully renovated facility on Parkside Drive, bringing 140 years of carefully archived materials with it. While the company’s world headquarters are located in Dallas, its global archives are painstakingly maintained here in Knoxville.

Susan Middleton, senior records analyst, and Louisea Stuart, corporate records manager, are full-time archivists based in Knoxville. They work closely with Heather Martin, another archivist, in Kimberly-Clark’s Neenah, Wis., office. While incoming additions to the archives are now backed up digitally, Middleton said there’s no substitute for physical records, particularly the time capsules of product samples compiled every year and sent out to clients and vendors as holiday gift boxes.

“A database can’t give you the detail that opening boxes can,” said Middleton, who has talked to the Smithsonian National Museum in Washington, D.C., about curating an exhibit of Kimberly-Clark products.

“There’s not a box in here that doesn’t have one good story,” Middleton said.

A peek inside the 1966 gift box reveals product-line extensions such as “man size” Kleenex and “Kleenex Juniors.” These tissues differed in softness and size, according to Middleton.

Maintaining actual product samples is critical to document “proof of concept” for marketing strategy as well as for liability purposes for makers of consumer packaged goods. Middleton receives regular requests for samples from Kimberly-Clark’s legal, marketing, design and global communications departments.

The archives were first housed at Kimberly-Clark’s original corporate headquarters in Neenah. The collection was later maintained by a third-party vendor in Vienna, Va. In 2010, CEO Thomas Falk made the decision to bring the archives back in-house. Middleton remembers the day two tractor-trailers arrived with more than 60 pallets of materials.

“It took a year just to get it on the shelf,” she recalled.

There were 50 years’ worth of safety bulletins from the mills, Civil War correspondence from employees to their families, and tear sheets of print ads from the 1920s.

Some of these vintage advertisements featured hand-illustrations of nurses promoting Kotex feminine hygiene products made of celucotton, a material originally developed and used for surgical bandages during the First World War. Ingenious Army nurses repurposed the hyper-absorbent bandages, and a new product was born.

The Kotex ads ran in Ladies’ Home Journal, whose readers regularly wrote letters to Kimberly-Clark’s staff nurse, Ellen J. Buckland. She was one of several brand ambassadors during the early days and was quoted in product inserts and advertisements as a subject matter expert. Nurse Buckland and her successors diligently answered letters and offered product advice to consumers for decades.

Kleenex, too, has a storied history. The world’s first facial tissue started out in the 1920s as a product designed specifically to remove cold cream. It was years before the notion of a disposable tissue for runny noses would catch on. Cloth handkerchiefs, like cloth diapers, were the norm for generations.

Kimberly-Clark also made the classic jeans labels for Levi Strauss & Co. as well as wood fiber cellulose lining for caskets.

The archives house unique items including a hand-transcribed ledger for Atlas Mills in Appleton, Wis., dating back to 1868 and a circa-1940s stock certificate signed by John Kimberly, grandson of one of the founders.

Digital versions of these items, as well as old photographs that capture the fashion, factory equipment and signage of the times, are displayed on Kimberly Mill’s Facebook Timeline. Some of these artifacts will be included in a commemorative book celebrating the life of founder Charles Clark, due to be published in early 2014.

There is a system to corporate record-keeping that includes a retention schedule and applied archival technology. Kimberly-Clark works with a contracted specialist to determine the historical value of materials. Middleton and her colleagues educate employees about the importance of ongoing data capture to document events. They try to strike a delicate balance, encouraging staff participation without interfering in day-to-day operations.

Middleton is well suited to the task. A former high school history teacher, she’s a born archivist. Stuart’s background is in medical records. These corporate historians are no amateur scrapbookers. They are trained researchers, guarding the rich history of a $21.2 billion company that supplies a quarter of the world’s population with personal care products, including Huggies, Pull-Ups, and Depends, in addition to Kleenex, Kotex and Scott Paper.

“The archives for all of Kimberly-Clark are housed here at our Knoxville site. We are honored to be entrusted by our company to be the keeper of Kimberly-Clark’s remarkable story,” said Steve Harmon, Kimberly-Clark’s Knoxville site leader.